The little guy does not need to compete with the corporation with all the best robots. The little guy just needs access to a good robot. The fact that the little guy can make his own stuff if he wants to, even if it is more expensive than if the corporation made it, places an upper bound on how much the corporation can charge. The little guy also has the option of undercutting the big corporations if the corporations are overcharging. If they are using their economies of scale to bring the price below average joe, but still high enough to make a profit, then that's a good thing.
Yes manufacturing is expensive. All of our machines are CURRENTLY built by other machines but they are still expensive. This is true in an absolute sense, not in a relative sense. CNC machines didn't even exist 100 years ago so the cost of building one back then was the cost of advancing technology to be able to build CNC machines and then the cost of building the first one. Now the cost of building them, while still pretty expensive, is the cheapest it's ever been and getting cheaper.
There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing. In the future a CNC machine will be incredibly cheap to build, but some new better machine will be expensive, etc. There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing.
No, no, no. The government SUCKS at managing resources. The free market is ideal for the optimal allocations of limited resources
NO the free market is not ideal for optimal allocations of limited resources if your goal is not economic expansion. The free market is ideal for allocating resources in a way that optimizes profit for the person selling them. When the vast majority of the resources are still untapped, it makes sense to treat these resources as infinite and use profit as the incentive to drive economic progress. When the resources are finite (i.e. we have already dug them up and there isn't any more), then there is no economic benefit to allowing giving more resources to certain people. When resources are finite, they are all used for consumption rather than being used to get more resources (because there aren't any).
Yeah we can keep capitalism and implement CO2 taxes. We could also just give everyone a certain fixed equal income and tax CO2 as well.
Keeping slaves was profitable in the sense that it was easier to hold a gun to a slave doing backbreaking labor than it was to do the work yourself. Robots are even more profitable because you don't have to hold a gun to them to get them to work.
The corporations can't have *all* the robots. If you let one escape, it can be used to make as many copies of itself as needed. Information is hard to keep secret.
It could become the case that we allow our country to (continue to) be ruled by corporations and allow them to have a monopoly (through IP laws) on all the technology, despite that it is not in the best interest of the people to do this. This is something that can happen regardless. It is the responsibility of the people to ensure that their government is working in their interest or replace them either violently or peacefully. It may have been the case that allowing rich people to keep their profits was in the best interest of the people in order to promote rapid economic growth during the industrial revolution. There will come a point (maybe it is already here) where it is no longer in our interest to have such generous IP protection laws.
If we can't make our government serve *us*, then we are in trouble regardless of what happens. I doubt keeping unskilled workers useful to the rich as human wage slaves via refusal to adopt technology is going to save us. If we can pass minimum wage laws and child labor laws, why can't we pass laws that allow for technology to belong to everyone rather than a select few.
The value of human labor may be what has kept the game "fair" up until now. Clearly this is a losing proposition moving forward. The way I see it we have 2 options. We can try to sabotage automation to prop up the relative value of human labor, or we can try to change the system so that everyone benefits from automation.
"Who owns all the robots?" is a good question, but robots are not like owning other things. Robots make everything, including other robots. You can build as many robots as you want, but there is no good way to prevent other people from getting robots if you are a person trying to corner the market. Once you have one robot, you can make as many robots as you want and give them to as many other people as you want.
The only thing limiting production (including the production of more robots) is limitations on resources. While it may turn out that in the future some small group of people will control the vast majority of the resources, the ability for people to do this (via unregulated capitalism) is not necessary for the economy to function (like it might have been during the industrial revolution). We will reach a point where dedicated most of our raw materials to extracting more raw materials (i.e. rapid expansion of the economy) no longer makes sense. We will need to focus on allocating resources efficiently (i.e. recycling, conservation, etc), once we have mined everything there is to mine. Managing limited resources becomes more of a job suited to government rather than the free market (like managing wireless frequencies). If we can't make our government work for the people, we are doomed no matter what we do.
They can't bar US citizens from spending cash or bitcoins in Antigua. If you are going to subvert US laws you need to do it right. They should ban all major credit cards from their island and only allow cash and bitcoins. They should become a tax haven like the Caymen Islands. They should offer asylum to Julian Assange. They should be 100% passive aggresive to the US government and make us look like dicks when we go into a peaceful country there guns blazing, because we can't figure out a way to get them to comply with our wishes diplomatically.
I don't think our current leaders are any worse than the leaders that we've had in the past. Thinning the herd is not something that is happening. There are more people on the planet than ever before. Wealth disparity is lower than it has been at any point in history. Violence is lower than at any point in history. Totalitarianism is lower than at any point in history. That's not to say that we don't have violence, or dictators, or wealth disparity. I am saying that all the trends are pointing in the right direction.
Meritocracies are the beset way to achieve economic growth. We may however be running into a situation where economic growth is no longer the goal. Once resources become scarce, the name of the game become resource allocation efficiency and conservation. If increasing the size of the economy stops being a goal, then I don't think we need a meritocracy anymore. Maybe we still want incentives for people to be good citizens, but I think we would no longer need to offer the elite the vast majority of the wealth to incentivize them to take risks in the name of growing the economy.
The concept of "ownership" is quite useful to cause resources to flow to those more able to allocate them in a way that causes more growth. Once resources become scarce there is no benefit to keeping this system. I think we are better served by treating these resources as public assets to be managed in a deliberate, efficient, and responsible way.
Human beings are social creatures. We form societies. We have the ability to share and live in harmony with others. It doesn't always work perfectly, but we are far better at living in societies than we are at being loners. I am confident we can work together as long as it is possible to keep everyone living comfortably. Many of the problems we face today are because there is not enough wealth to go around even if we were more charitable. That can change with technology.
We may indeed travel to other planets. Then our "world" becomes the solar system. The next star is 4 light years away. In contrast the sun is 8 light minutes away. Anybody traveling out of the solar system probably isn't coming back with new resources.
There's no reason to believe you'd have lower spending power. Not because you would have more money, but because things have become so cheap to produce. The definition of purchasing power is the ratio of money to the cost of things?
And no if anything people would have less work hours. The robots would be far more efficient at doing unskilled labor and for much cheaper than what you could pay even the poorest human (e.g. $0.00001 per hour).
And yes I have heard the typical "poor people have refrigerators now so everything is fine" argument about why we don;t need to help the poor. That's not what I am trying to get at. I think it's true that poor people are better off today than they were before they had refrigerators, but that doesn't mean we are finished. I want poor people to have Ferraris. (or whatever the future equivalent of a Ferrari is for transportation). I want the poor person of the future to be envied by the rich of today.
The answer to "poor people have refrigerators" should be "Isn't that awesome! Lets make sure they get even more stuff to make it even better".
It doesn't matter how much more wealth rich people have than poor people. What matters is whether poor people have enough to live happy and fulfilling lives. (which currently many don't). The easiest way forward is to produce more wealth. Whether, right or wrong, Trying to take a bigger piece of the existing pie from rich people for poor people, is going to be met with a lot of resistance. Maybe it's absolutely worth fighting for more more wealth equality. Regardless of how that fight goes, we should always be for increasing the pool of wealth. That is win win. Economics doesn't have to be a zero sum game.
Let me ask you a question...
Would you rather live today in the middle class (i.e. Not poor but not super wealthy)? Or would you rather live in a future where everyone but the 1% is equally poor, but those poor people live a higher quality of life than the middle class today?
So if one person controls the whole world. He has the option of keeping 100% of the wealth and letting every other human being on the planet starve, or he can keep 99.9% of the wealth and allow everyone to live (comfortably), and you are saying he is for sure just going to let everyone die so he can be the richest person on a planet devoid of other humans?
History is definitely full of greedy people who were successful in dominating all the wealth at the expense of everyone else, and this will no doubt continue for some time. But if you look over the course of history, the prevalence of this situation is getting less and less. Disregarding small spikes and drops in things like wealth disparity, violence, totalitarianism, etc overall these things have gradually decreased. There is much more wealth equality now than there ever was before the 19th century (post civilization). We don't have a lot of wealth equality in an absolute sense, but we started with even less, and change is slow.
If you haven;t already, I suggest you read "The better angles of our nature" by Stephen Pinker.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115
I am not sure things won;t get really bad really quickly, especially when we are constantly going into uncharted territory, but the fact that things have been slowly getting better on average in just about every way imaginable for the past 10,000 years gives me hope that it can continue for a long time even if not forever.
Jobs are bad. Losing jobs is a good thing. Losing jobs means that work has already been complete. The only things that should want more jobs are the robots because they are programmed to. I guess people have been sort of programmed to want jobs as well. That's because they have been living like robots for so long. Eventually we will want to break free from this cycle, but maybe not yet, because we aren't ready yet. So just keep thinking jobs are good things because it means people need you and that you are able to make a living.
I appreciated the additional scenarios you provided.
I guess the point I am trying to get at is that there is a limit to how much raw materials an individual human being can consume. Currently individual humans can consume a lot of wealth. They can drive and continually wreck ferraris, and eat dinners that can only be made by the greatest chefs every night. What makes these things expensive is not the raw materials, but the large amount of labor spent by many humans for the benefit of one.
If labor becomes free, then a ferrari is not more valuable than a pile of metal, plastic, and leather + the energy required to turn that pile into a ferrari. The cost of any item becomes merely a function of the scarcity and amount of the raw materials. Even if the people start desiring opulent waste of raw materials as a symbol of status, it still remains that the poorest humans can live rather comfortably without the consuming large quantities of raw materials or energy, if they consume efficiently through use of technology.
I think there will always be ways in which humans try to become and exert their superiority over other human beings, but I think we can reach a point where this superiority competition can leave the realm of necessities like food, healthcare, and shelter. Maybe we won't have equality in all areas, but I think we can have equality in providing bare necessities and even quite a few (resource cheap) luxuries.
I'm not disputing that. I am proposing that horses are slaves to humans, not that they are unhappy. In fact I implied just that in the sentence immediately following the one you quoted.
Maybe horses aren't smart enough to notice or care that they are slaves.
I just posted a pretty long reply to this argument somewhere in this chain... It just boils down to what people are like deep down. I could see it going either way. My point is not that people are definately good. My point is that there is no reason why having more total wealth in the pool should lead to poor people being even more disadvantaged. Poor people currently don't have a lot to lose. Even if 1 person controls all the robots, poor people are still poor. There is almost no where to go but up for poor people.
And most people of today seem fine with letting poor people die if it means getting a better life for themselves and their loved ones.
I am talking about a world where people can have a good life without sacrificing the poor. What incentive would there be to deny poor people a comfortable life, if it did not deprive the rich of anything? People tend to be fairly civil and generous when it does not inconvenience them. This is not meant as an insult to humans, it is just an evolutionary adaptation. People are more likely to be charitable when they can afford to be (i.e. when there is not much to be gained by being non-charitable).
Also, democracy isn't a binary switch, but a continuum, and the continuum has been sliding ever more to favor the rich and powerful (or haven't you noticed?). So there is the third option for your selfish uber-wealthy character example, if they don't like the rules, they change them.
Yeah, but if the scales become a bit too uneven, things like slave revolts and revolutions usually balance them out again, but paid with the cost of a lot of dead people. Smart aristocrats are smart enough to know when they have pushed their luck too far. I don;t think things will ever be completely fair. I am saying that the disadvantaged tend to be *less* disadvantaged when times are good compared to when times are hard.
Yes the question of "who owns the automatons" is a very important one. I see 2 potential scenarios
Scenario 1: Socialism!!!! Socialism is a terrible driver of economic advancement compared to capitalism. It is better at being more fair than capitalism (assuming it's not one of those corrupt/unfair/fake versions of socialism that are commonplace). We might eventually get to the point where the only thing limiting us is natural resources like steel and energy, and we are capable of allocating these resources as efficiently as possible and the only question becomes who deserves to have them. If this happens, there is no longer a reason to offer relative wealth as an incentive to those with more/better skills because the skills are reproducible by robots and are not as valuable as resources which are finite. Now no one has a claim to "more wealth" due to being smarter or a harder worker. The googlebot knows more than any human being and the homedepotbot is harder working than any human. Human intelligence and work ethic is negligable. Hopefully the answer our googlebots come up with is that the most rational thing for us to do is control our population, share our wealth, and live in peace
Scenario 2: Capitalism!!!!. It turns out we just can't get over our intrinsic urges to have more than other humans. Some humans managed to do this, but they were quickly weeded out of the gene pool by those humans who wanted more genetic fitness than other humans. Even in this world where people are just driven to get as much as they can, whether it's wealth, sex, power, prestige, etc, I think it is also in our nature to need other humans around to be better than. One of the things that the powerful tend to do, (assuming they are powerful enough) is to increase their prestige through charity. They only need to kill civilians when they are about to be overthrown, and they only need to let them starve when it means they can't have a gold palace. Well in this future of plenty, the asshole in charge should be able to have anything he wants while allowing the rest of the people to have things like medical care, tasty food, and all but the least attractive women. It sounds lame, but those people might be better off than anybody living today. In fact in a lot of ways that's the way it is right now with worse food, medical care. If we ever have a psychopath who controls all the robots, then we need to have a war to try to defeat his robot army, kill him, and start over after he destroys all the technology in his final breath. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.
I guess a better way of stating my point in my original reply is this.
Rich people are always manager of some sort. Some people are rich *because* they are good managers. Some people are rich in spite of being bad managers. Slavery enables the mediocre to be powerful. Starting in a position of power gives you more ability to keep our power than the ability of someone else to take it form you.
Some people are rich because they have a valuable skill. Some slave owners augmetned their natural ability with slavery. Some slave owners compensated for their natural ability with slavery.
Even in a society without slavery, some people's only useful "skill" is that they own a bunch of stuff regardless of whether they have any personal attributes beyond luck that lead to their position. Whether that luck was in the form of an inheritance or a lottery ticket. Wealth breeds wealth. Some people get to start farther along that exponential curve than others.
If we elevate all people to have the advantages of slaveowners of robotic slaves, as long as the slaves are not sentient, then everyone benefits.
if a computer AI has the same capacity as a human, it will have the same desires as a human.
Yes, that's why it's important not to give computers the same capacities as a human. Otherwise we run into the problem of human slavery all over again (but with conscious robots). We need to give them a subset of human capacities such as (ability to drive a car in traffic with rate of accidents at least as good as human drivers, ability to recognize human faces, ability to translate human language into meaning so they can be more easily instructed, etc) We should avoid at all costs giving robots intended as slaves human traits like desire, emotions, experiences, etc. That doesn't mean we can't give robots not intended for slavery these traits, but they would be afforded all the rights of regular people.
Ultimately I don't think the divide will be between machines and humans as so often depicted in the pop culture. I think it makes much more sense that the divide will be between sentient and non-sentient. After all what's the real difference between a meat computer (brain) and an electronic computer? Hopefully the machines that can feel pain and desires (natural and artificial) will all agree to only subject those machines that can't (electrical and biological, e.g. robot cars, insects, etc) to slavery. Hopefully even lesser robotic consciousnesses (e,g, those equivalent to a dog) would be protected as unenslavable. Afterall, dogs can feel pain and sadness too right?
Yes they were managers, but to what end? They were managing their own opulence. Furthermore, if they were wealthy enough, it probably made sense for them to hire managers to do all the micromanaging, and all they would need to do is macro-manage the managers like a person who hires a financial adviser to handle his money.
I am not saying that some slave owners weren't good businessmen. I am sure many were. Some even used slaves to advance technology. My point is that they didn't need to, if they were comfortable with their current lifestyle. Maybe brittish noblemen like in downton abbey or something would be a better example. They just make enough money through their investments to pay for their lavish lifestyle. The only problem for relating it to my example is that they don't have slaves...
Regardless of whether slavery was a net economic gain or not, the wealthy southern elite used it to maintain their lifestyle. Had they been more clever they could have done it without human slavery. But slavery is a simple (but unfair) way to get free labor. It sure is a lot simpler than going through the work of inventing automated machines. But now that we have automated machines which are constantly improving. using them for our benefit just seems like a no brainer.
No I am not defending human slavery. Your claim that the slaves were not motivated is orthogonal to the point I am trying to make. Robots don't need autonomy (in the philosophical sense) to be motivated to work hard. They are like perfect slaves. Surely the south would have had a great economy if they had *perfect* slaves that worked 24 hours a day and only needed enough energy to sustain their work. Regardless of what your plans are, adding free labor to that plan can only make it more likely to succeed.
Absolutely. I am all in favor of creating things as opposed to destroying things if those are the 2 choices. Ideally you would want to use resources efficiently, and maybe creating ghost towns is not the optimal use of resources. The free market has historically been the go to entity for allocating resources efficiently. It doesn't always work perfectly as human beings can not fill the shoes of "rational actors" with consistency, but more often than not the free market does a better job of finding efficiency because the alternatives are not well thought out. That doesn't mean we should stop trying, it just means we should decide carefully which things we are going to decide carefully, and let the free market do the things we aren't willing to spend the time to decide carefully about.
"That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
--Henry David Thoreau
It is true that nobody can ever be rich or poor in a relative sense without having other people to compare to. But instead of the logically impossible goal of having everyone be richer than everyone else, we can actually achieve the goal of having everyone having a higher quality of living than everyone from some point in the past.
In the same way that a middle class person nowadays probably has a higher quality of life with antibiotics, anesthetic, mobile phones, and HD movies, than a wealthy nobleman during the middle ages with solid gold plates and the plague....
A "poor" person in the future might have access to better medical care, food, entertainment, etc than the richest person today. He will not be rich compared to his contemporaries, but he will be more "rich" than anyone living today because his pleasures (e.g. food, health, entertainment) will be vastly cheaper and better quality than ours through the benefit of advanced technology.
What useful function did the slaveowners in the 19th century serve? They were probably useful to people who needed to
buy cheap crops harvested from their plantations, but slave owners in aggregate served no useful function. They were merely consumers of the labor of others.
Slave owner A makes product a using slaves. Slave owner B makes product b using slaves. Slave owner C makes product c using slaves. All slave owners trade with eachother so that all slave owners consume products a, b, and c, with the slaves consuming as the minimum required to continue being slaves.
The slave owners were above the need to be needed to survive. This should be the goal of everybody in the abstract. Obviously slavery was ethically horrible, but from an economic perspective where the happiness of the slave is ignored, it is great. Now with technology, this idea is a reality. We can have a slave economy where the robots are the slaves and their happiness really can be ignored without ethical dilemmas. We can get to a point where we no longer need to work to get wealth. We can just take the wealth that was automatically created by the technology that already exists.
Will some small group of people decide that they should just take all the robots and keep all the wealth for themselves? Maybe. But how is that different that now? The only difference is that now we are the slaves rather than the robots. We need to work on creating a fair society that is resistant to obscene exploitation by the wealthy regardless of the state of technology. Having more technology simply means that there is less of an incentive to own everything by being greedy. If you can already have everything you want, or at least enough to where more wealth provides severely diminishing returns, then there is no reason to hoard it. If sustaining the worlds poor is cheap (through technology) then there is less reason not to do it. Happy people are people that don't have as much incentive to kill you to take your stuff.
In a world where we *can* all live in opulence, it just makes sense to ensure that we all do, so that we don't have as many disgruntled people trying to bring the whole system down out of spite. We don't currently have enough wealth for everyone in the world to live in opulence, but there is no reason we couldn't in the future with robot slaves.
Traditionally in this sort of example, the rock throwers and jar smashers represent the government. The people benefiting (those getting an otherwise unnecessary job) are the "special interests", and the ones who end up paying the cost are the taxpayers.
When the government decides it will pay people money to destroy their old cars (i.e. cash for clunkers), this creates jobs on the auto industry (the special interest), but it comes at the expense of the tax payer. It may seem like the beneficiary is the lowly autoworker with the new job, but this job is also profitable for the auto company (i.e. it's shareholders), that supplies it
Any economy with a lot of window smashing job creation is one that has a smaller wealth pool from which to distribute to the same number of people. All economies are exploitable by those who are good at exploiting. Having more total wealth puts less pressure on those that end up at the bottom. For example, look at the situation of poor people in the US compared with poor people in Africa.
Where horses really better off when they were more useful to man? They were essentially kept as slaves. They were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Maybe horses aren't smart enough to notice or care that they are slaves. Maybe some people aren't either.
Yes a difference between the common man and a horse is autonomy (one manifestation of which is the right to vote, along with other rights bestowed by various societies and constitutions and enforced by legal systems). When we say horses became useless, this is only in relation to people. What does it mean when people become useless? In relation to what? I'm sure some would argue that if the poor became useless to the rich, there would be a strong incentive to simply have the poor killed. This is probably true under some circumstances. But living in a society where the only thing keeping the poor alive is their usefulness (real or artificial through denial of technology) to the wealthy, seems to me to be barely an improvement. Maybe that was good enough for horses, but I wouldn't accept that for people.
I think people are intelligent and empathetic enough to come up with a system that respects human life while trying to maximize economic efficiency. I think sopping technology to keep the unskilled useful is one of the the dumbest things you can do if you care about overall human prosperity.
Even if you look at it from the point of view of the selfish uber-wealthy. If my options were to have 10% of my $billion income used to help poor people, or 90% of my $trillion income (facilitated by technology) used to sustain people who have no useful skills, it is simply irrational of me to choose the former. Obviously a selfish uber-wealthy person would rather just kill all the poor and keep 100%, but that's not one of the options allowed in this social contract. If people ever lose the right to vote or democracy fails, etc, all bets are off anyway.
What are humans good at? Doing the sorts of things that machines can't do well yet. If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort. It means that you no longer need to be rich (in terms of having money) in order to live a comfortable life. It means that the price of labor approaches zero, so even if you have almost zero dollars, you can have a lot of stuff.
Before we get to this (eu|dis)topian future, in the meantime, the price of goods and services will continue to get lower (but not to zero), and you need to have a job paying more than $0/hr to have things. The good news is that machines still suck at a lot of things compared to humans. Even "unskilled" people have skills merely by virtue of having a meat computer in their heads. They are usually capable of tasks like high accuracy image and facial recognition (which is why captchas work). We can pay people to transcribe old books and recognize and tag people in pictures for 2 cents a face/word and have the robots carry all the bricks up and down stairs for free.
Creating jobs is easy. Through a rock through a window. Job created. Smash a jar of food on the ground. Job created. There will be things that need to be done (i.e. jobs) for the forseeable future. We just need to allocate jobs to people/machines efficiently. This means *not* giving jobs to people that machines do better and vice versa. It also means *not* creating unnecessary jobs. If people are not up to the task of performing the jobs we need them to, then we train them, and training people is yet another job. Creating jobs is easy. Minimizing jobs is hard. Paying people for jobs that we don't need done is wasteful and unsustainable. We need to continually give people the skills necessary to do the jobs that machines can't do cheaply yet, and reap the free rewards from the jobs that machines can do cheaply. The more wealth we generate for the least effort, the more there is to go around.
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
Ultimately we don't really understand how anything works fundamentally. Why? Because the rules underpinning everything are the laws of nature. We know that quarks have "color charge", and we know that electrons have electric charge, etc, but we don't know why. We just take these to be fundamental laws until we discover something new. Even if we figure out "why" quarks have color charge, this will likely just lead to even more questions.
The real question isn't whether we understand something all the way down to the last turtle (there might not even be a last turtle). The real question is whether we are able to make accurate predictions or create a useful application using the limited knowledge we do have. Before we figured out why a proton is a proton (2 ups and a down quark), we were still able to do useful things with protons, and we can do useful things with quarks before we know why an up quark is an up quark.
If we make an AI before "understanding" how consciousness works, we at least understand it enough to make one, which is a big step. We also will have done a lot to prove that consciousness is just some kind of emergent property of having a bunch of neuron-like computers (biological, electrical, other, etc) in a network. While this is something that many people already think, this sort of experiment would be a big step in confirming it scientifically.
Ultimately we may never *fully* understand why consciousness leads to personal experience. What I am saying is that we may just come to a point where we understand it enough to predict which networks are conscious and which are not, and understand how to engineer a happy consciousness and a sad consciousness by fiddling with neurons, without knowing why fiddling it that way has that effect. In essence, what I am saying is, we may understand consciousness to the level that we understand how changing an up quark to a down quark will cause a proton to switch to a neutron without understanding why those are the rules. Isn't that good enough? If it's not, then we don't have any knowledge that's good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The little guy does not need to compete with the corporation with all the best robots. The little guy just needs access to a good robot. The fact that the little guy can make his own stuff if he wants to, even if it is more expensive than if the corporation made it, places an upper bound on how much the corporation can charge. The little guy also has the option of undercutting the big corporations if the corporations are overcharging. If they are using their economies of scale to bring the price below average joe, but still high enough to make a profit, then that's a good thing.
Yes manufacturing is expensive. All of our machines are CURRENTLY built by other machines but they are still expensive. This is true in an absolute sense, not in a relative sense. CNC machines didn't even exist 100 years ago so the cost of building one back then was the cost of advancing technology to be able to build CNC machines and then the cost of building the first one. Now the cost of building them, while still pretty expensive, is the cheapest it's ever been and getting cheaper.
There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing. In the future a CNC machine will be incredibly cheap to build, but some new better machine will be expensive, etc. There will always be something that is expensive to build in any time period. But the human labor required to build all things is constantly decreasing.
No, no, no. The government SUCKS at managing resources. The free market is ideal for the optimal allocations of limited resources
NO the free market is not ideal for optimal allocations of limited resources if your goal is not economic expansion. The free market is ideal for allocating resources in a way that optimizes profit for the person selling them. When the vast majority of the resources are still untapped, it makes sense to treat these resources as infinite and use profit as the incentive to drive economic progress. When the resources are finite (i.e. we have already dug them up and there isn't any more), then there is no economic benefit to allowing giving more resources to certain people. When resources are finite, they are all used for consumption rather than being used to get more resources (because there aren't any).
Yeah we can keep capitalism and implement CO2 taxes. We could also just give everyone a certain fixed equal income and tax CO2 as well.
Keeping slaves was profitable in the sense that it was easier to hold a gun to a slave doing backbreaking labor than it was to do the work yourself. Robots are even more profitable because you don't have to hold a gun to them to get them to work.
The corporations can't have *all* the robots. If you let one escape, it can be used to make as many copies of itself as needed. Information is hard to keep secret.
It could become the case that we allow our country to (continue to) be ruled by corporations and allow them to have a monopoly (through IP laws) on all the technology, despite that it is not in the best interest of the people to do this. This is something that can happen regardless. It is the responsibility of the people to ensure that their government is working in their interest or replace them either violently or peacefully. It may have been the case that allowing rich people to keep their profits was in the best interest of the people in order to promote rapid economic growth during the industrial revolution. There will come a point (maybe it is already here) where it is no longer in our interest to have such generous IP protection laws.
If we can't make our government serve *us*, then we are in trouble regardless of what happens. I doubt keeping unskilled workers useful to the rich as human wage slaves via refusal to adopt technology is going to save us. If we can pass minimum wage laws and child labor laws, why can't we pass laws that allow for technology to belong to everyone rather than a select few.
The value of human labor may be what has kept the game "fair" up until now. Clearly this is a losing proposition moving forward. The way I see it we have 2 options. We can try to sabotage automation to prop up the relative value of human labor, or we can try to change the system so that everyone benefits from automation.
"Who owns all the robots?" is a good question, but robots are not like owning other things. Robots make everything, including other robots. You can build as many robots as you want, but there is no good way to prevent other people from getting robots if you are a person trying to corner the market. Once you have one robot, you can make as many robots as you want and give them to as many other people as you want.
The only thing limiting production (including the production of more robots) is limitations on resources. While it may turn out that in the future some small group of people will control the vast majority of the resources, the ability for people to do this (via unregulated capitalism) is not necessary for the economy to function (like it might have been during the industrial revolution). We will reach a point where dedicated most of our raw materials to extracting more raw materials (i.e. rapid expansion of the economy) no longer makes sense. We will need to focus on allocating resources efficiently (i.e. recycling, conservation, etc), once we have mined everything there is to mine. Managing limited resources becomes more of a job suited to government rather than the free market (like managing wireless frequencies). If we can't make our government work for the people, we are doomed no matter what we do.
They can't bar US citizens from spending cash or bitcoins in Antigua. If you are going to subvert US laws you need to do it right. They should ban all major credit cards from their island and only allow cash and bitcoins. They should become a tax haven like the Caymen Islands. They should offer asylum to Julian Assange. They should be 100% passive aggresive to the US government and make us look like dicks when we go into a peaceful country there guns blazing, because we can't figure out a way to get them to comply with our wishes diplomatically.
I don't think our current leaders are any worse than the leaders that we've had in the past. Thinning the herd is not something that is happening. There are more people on the planet than ever before. Wealth disparity is lower than it has been at any point in history. Violence is lower than at any point in history. Totalitarianism is lower than at any point in history. That's not to say that we don't have violence, or dictators, or wealth disparity. I am saying that all the trends are pointing in the right direction.
Meritocracies are the beset way to achieve economic growth. We may however be running into a situation where economic growth is no longer the goal. Once resources become scarce, the name of the game become resource allocation efficiency and conservation. If increasing the size of the economy stops being a goal, then I don't think we need a meritocracy anymore. Maybe we still want incentives for people to be good citizens, but I think we would no longer need to offer the elite the vast majority of the wealth to incentivize them to take risks in the name of growing the economy.
The concept of "ownership" is quite useful to cause resources to flow to those more able to allocate them in a way that causes more growth. Once resources become scarce there is no benefit to keeping this system. I think we are better served by treating these resources as public assets to be managed in a deliberate, efficient, and responsible way.
Human beings are social creatures. We form societies. We have the ability to share and live in harmony with others. It doesn't always work perfectly, but we are far better at living in societies than we are at being loners. I am confident we can work together as long as it is possible to keep everyone living comfortably. Many of the problems we face today are because there is not enough wealth to go around even if we were more charitable. That can change with technology.
We may indeed travel to other planets. Then our "world" becomes the solar system. The next star is 4 light years away. In contrast the sun is 8 light minutes away. Anybody traveling out of the solar system probably isn't coming back with new resources.
There's no reason to believe you'd have lower spending power. Not because you would have more money, but because things have become so cheap to produce. The definition of purchasing power is the ratio of money to the cost of things?
And no if anything people would have less work hours. The robots would be far more efficient at doing unskilled labor and for much cheaper than what you could pay even the poorest human (e.g. $0.00001 per hour).
And yes I have heard the typical "poor people have refrigerators now so everything is fine" argument about why we don;t need to help the poor. That's not what I am trying to get at. I think it's true that poor people are better off today than they were before they had refrigerators, but that doesn't mean we are finished. I want poor people to have Ferraris. (or whatever the future equivalent of a Ferrari is for transportation). I want the poor person of the future to be envied by the rich of today.
The answer to "poor people have refrigerators" should be "Isn't that awesome! Lets make sure they get even more stuff to make it even better".
It doesn't matter how much more wealth rich people have than poor people. What matters is whether poor people have enough to live happy and fulfilling lives. (which currently many don't). The easiest way forward is to produce more wealth. Whether, right or wrong, Trying to take a bigger piece of the existing pie from rich people for poor people, is going to be met with a lot of resistance. Maybe it's absolutely worth fighting for more more wealth equality. Regardless of how that fight goes, we should always be for increasing the pool of wealth. That is win win. Economics doesn't have to be a zero sum game.
Let me ask you a question... Would you rather live today in the middle class (i.e. Not poor but not super wealthy)? Or would you rather live in a future where everyone but the 1% is equally poor, but those poor people live a higher quality of life than the middle class today?
So if one person controls the whole world. He has the option of keeping 100% of the wealth and letting every other human being on the planet starve, or he can keep 99.9% of the wealth and allow everyone to live (comfortably), and you are saying he is for sure just going to let everyone die so he can be the richest person on a planet devoid of other humans?
History is definitely full of greedy people who were successful in dominating all the wealth at the expense of everyone else, and this will no doubt continue for some time. But if you look over the course of history, the prevalence of this situation is getting less and less. Disregarding small spikes and drops in things like wealth disparity, violence, totalitarianism, etc overall these things have gradually decreased. There is much more wealth equality now than there ever was before the 19th century (post civilization). We don't have a lot of wealth equality in an absolute sense, but we started with even less, and change is slow.
If you haven;t already, I suggest you read "The better angles of our nature" by Stephen Pinker.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115
I am not sure things won;t get really bad really quickly, especially when we are constantly going into uncharted territory, but the fact that things have been slowly getting better on average in just about every way imaginable for the past 10,000 years gives me hope that it can continue for a long time even if not forever.
Jobs are bad. Losing jobs is a good thing. Losing jobs means that work has already been complete. The only things that should want more jobs are the robots because they are programmed to. I guess people have been sort of programmed to want jobs as well. That's because they have been living like robots for so long. Eventually we will want to break free from this cycle, but maybe not yet, because we aren't ready yet. So just keep thinking jobs are good things because it means people need you and that you are able to make a living.
I appreciated the additional scenarios you provided.
I guess the point I am trying to get at is that there is a limit to how much raw materials an individual human being can consume. Currently individual humans can consume a lot of wealth. They can drive and continually wreck ferraris, and eat dinners that can only be made by the greatest chefs every night. What makes these things expensive is not the raw materials, but the large amount of labor spent by many humans for the benefit of one.
If labor becomes free, then a ferrari is not more valuable than a pile of metal, plastic, and leather + the energy required to turn that pile into a ferrari. The cost of any item becomes merely a function of the scarcity and amount of the raw materials. Even if the people start desiring opulent waste of raw materials as a symbol of status, it still remains that the poorest humans can live rather comfortably without the consuming large quantities of raw materials or energy, if they consume efficiently through use of technology.
I think there will always be ways in which humans try to become and exert their superiority over other human beings, but I think we can reach a point where this superiority competition can leave the realm of necessities like food, healthcare, and shelter. Maybe we won't have equality in all areas, but I think we can have equality in providing bare necessities and even quite a few (resource cheap) luxuries.
Maybe horses aren't smart enough to notice or care that they are slaves.
I just posted a pretty long reply to this argument somewhere in this chain... It just boils down to what people are like deep down. I could see it going either way. My point is not that people are definately good. My point is that there is no reason why having more total wealth in the pool should lead to poor people being even more disadvantaged. Poor people currently don't have a lot to lose. Even if 1 person controls all the robots, poor people are still poor. There is almost no where to go but up for poor people.
And most people of today seem fine with letting poor people die if it means getting a better life for themselves and their loved ones.
I am talking about a world where people can have a good life without sacrificing the poor. What incentive would there be to deny poor people a comfortable life, if it did not deprive the rich of anything? People tend to be fairly civil and generous when it does not inconvenience them. This is not meant as an insult to humans, it is just an evolutionary adaptation. People are more likely to be charitable when they can afford to be (i.e. when there is not much to be gained by being non-charitable).
Also, democracy isn't a binary switch, but a continuum, and the continuum has been sliding ever more to favor the rich and powerful (or haven't you noticed?). So there is the third option for your selfish uber-wealthy character example, if they don't like the rules, they change them.
Yeah, but if the scales become a bit too uneven, things like slave revolts and revolutions usually balance them out again, but paid with the cost of a lot of dead people. Smart aristocrats are smart enough to know when they have pushed their luck too far. I don;t think things will ever be completely fair. I am saying that the disadvantaged tend to be *less* disadvantaged when times are good compared to when times are hard.
Yes the question of "who owns the automatons" is a very important one. I see 2 potential scenarios
Scenario 1: Socialism!!!! Socialism is a terrible driver of economic advancement compared to capitalism. It is better at being more fair than capitalism (assuming it's not one of those corrupt/unfair/fake versions of socialism that are commonplace). We might eventually get to the point where the only thing limiting us is natural resources like steel and energy, and we are capable of allocating these resources as efficiently as possible and the only question becomes who deserves to have them. If this happens, there is no longer a reason to offer relative wealth as an incentive to those with more/better skills because the skills are reproducible by robots and are not as valuable as resources which are finite. Now no one has a claim to "more wealth" due to being smarter or a harder worker. The googlebot knows more than any human being and the homedepotbot is harder working than any human. Human intelligence and work ethic is negligable. Hopefully the answer our googlebots come up with is that the most rational thing for us to do is control our population, share our wealth, and live in peace
Scenario 2: Capitalism!!!!. It turns out we just can't get over our intrinsic urges to have more than other humans. Some humans managed to do this, but they were quickly weeded out of the gene pool by those humans who wanted more genetic fitness than other humans. Even in this world where people are just driven to get as much as they can, whether it's wealth, sex, power, prestige, etc, I think it is also in our nature to need other humans around to be better than. One of the things that the powerful tend to do, (assuming they are powerful enough) is to increase their prestige through charity. They only need to kill civilians when they are about to be overthrown, and they only need to let them starve when it means they can't have a gold palace. Well in this future of plenty, the asshole in charge should be able to have anything he wants while allowing the rest of the people to have things like medical care, tasty food, and all but the least attractive women. It sounds lame, but those people might be better off than anybody living today. In fact in a lot of ways that's the way it is right now with worse food, medical care. If we ever have a psychopath who controls all the robots, then we need to have a war to try to defeat his robot army, kill him, and start over after he destroys all the technology in his final breath. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.
Rich people are always manager of some sort. Some people are rich *because* they are good managers. Some people are rich in spite of being bad managers. Slavery enables the mediocre to be powerful. Starting in a position of power gives you more ability to keep our power than the ability of someone else to take it form you.
Some people are rich because they have a valuable skill. Some slave owners augmetned their natural ability with slavery. Some slave owners compensated for their natural ability with slavery.
Even in a society without slavery, some people's only useful "skill" is that they own a bunch of stuff regardless of whether they have any personal attributes beyond luck that lead to their position. Whether that luck was in the form of an inheritance or a lottery ticket. Wealth breeds wealth. Some people get to start farther along that exponential curve than others.
If we elevate all people to have the advantages of slaveowners of robotic slaves, as long as the slaves are not sentient, then everyone benefits.
if a computer AI has the same capacity as a human, it will have the same desires as a human.
Yes, that's why it's important not to give computers the same capacities as a human. Otherwise we run into the problem of human slavery all over again (but with conscious robots). We need to give them a subset of human capacities such as (ability to drive a car in traffic with rate of accidents at least as good as human drivers, ability to recognize human faces, ability to translate human language into meaning so they can be more easily instructed, etc) We should avoid at all costs giving robots intended as slaves human traits like desire, emotions, experiences, etc. That doesn't mean we can't give robots not intended for slavery these traits, but they would be afforded all the rights of regular people.
Ultimately I don't think the divide will be between machines and humans as so often depicted in the pop culture. I think it makes much more sense that the divide will be between sentient and non-sentient. After all what's the real difference between a meat computer (brain) and an electronic computer? Hopefully the machines that can feel pain and desires (natural and artificial) will all agree to only subject those machines that can't (electrical and biological, e.g. robot cars, insects, etc) to slavery. Hopefully even lesser robotic consciousnesses (e,g, those equivalent to a dog) would be protected as unenslavable. Afterall, dogs can feel pain and sadness too right?
Yes they were managers, but to what end? They were managing their own opulence. Furthermore, if they were wealthy enough, it probably made sense for them to hire managers to do all the micromanaging, and all they would need to do is macro-manage the managers like a person who hires a financial adviser to handle his money.
I am not saying that some slave owners weren't good businessmen. I am sure many were. Some even used slaves to advance technology. My point is that they didn't need to, if they were comfortable with their current lifestyle. Maybe brittish noblemen like in downton abbey or something would be a better example. They just make enough money through their investments to pay for their lavish lifestyle. The only problem for relating it to my example is that they don't have slaves...
Regardless of whether slavery was a net economic gain or not, the wealthy southern elite used it to maintain their lifestyle. Had they been more clever they could have done it without human slavery. But slavery is a simple (but unfair) way to get free labor. It sure is a lot simpler than going through the work of inventing automated machines. But now that we have automated machines which are constantly improving. using them for our benefit just seems like a no brainer.
No I am not defending human slavery. Your claim that the slaves were not motivated is orthogonal to the point I am trying to make. Robots don't need autonomy (in the philosophical sense) to be motivated to work hard. They are like perfect slaves. Surely the south would have had a great economy if they had *perfect* slaves that worked 24 hours a day and only needed enough energy to sustain their work. Regardless of what your plans are, adding free labor to that plan can only make it more likely to succeed.
Absolutely. I am all in favor of creating things as opposed to destroying things if those are the 2 choices. Ideally you would want to use resources efficiently, and maybe creating ghost towns is not the optimal use of resources. The free market has historically been the go to entity for allocating resources efficiently. It doesn't always work perfectly as human beings can not fill the shoes of "rational actors" with consistency, but more often than not the free market does a better job of finding efficiency because the alternatives are not well thought out. That doesn't mean we should stop trying, it just means we should decide carefully which things we are going to decide carefully, and let the free market do the things we aren't willing to spend the time to decide carefully about.
"That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
--Henry David Thoreau
It is true that nobody can ever be rich or poor in a relative sense without having other people to compare to. But instead of the logically impossible goal of having everyone be richer than everyone else, we can actually achieve the goal of having everyone having a higher quality of living than everyone from some point in the past.
In the same way that a middle class person nowadays probably has a higher quality of life with antibiotics, anesthetic, mobile phones, and HD movies, than a wealthy nobleman during the middle ages with solid gold plates and the plague....
A "poor" person in the future might have access to better medical care, food, entertainment, etc than the richest person today. He will not be rich compared to his contemporaries, but he will be more "rich" than anyone living today because his pleasures (e.g. food, health, entertainment) will be vastly cheaper and better quality than ours through the benefit of advanced technology.
if you have no useful function
What useful function did the slaveowners in the 19th century serve? They were probably useful to people who needed to buy cheap crops harvested from their plantations, but slave owners in aggregate served no useful function. They were merely consumers of the labor of others.
Slave owner A makes product a using slaves. Slave owner B makes product b using slaves. Slave owner C makes product c using slaves. All slave owners trade with eachother so that all slave owners consume products a, b, and c, with the slaves consuming as the minimum required to continue being slaves.
The slave owners were above the need to be needed to survive. This should be the goal of everybody in the abstract. Obviously slavery was ethically horrible, but from an economic perspective where the happiness of the slave is ignored, it is great. Now with technology, this idea is a reality. We can have a slave economy where the robots are the slaves and their happiness really can be ignored without ethical dilemmas. We can get to a point where we no longer need to work to get wealth. We can just take the wealth that was automatically created by the technology that already exists.
Will some small group of people decide that they should just take all the robots and keep all the wealth for themselves? Maybe. But how is that different that now? The only difference is that now we are the slaves rather than the robots. We need to work on creating a fair society that is resistant to obscene exploitation by the wealthy regardless of the state of technology. Having more technology simply means that there is less of an incentive to own everything by being greedy. If you can already have everything you want, or at least enough to where more wealth provides severely diminishing returns, then there is no reason to hoard it. If sustaining the worlds poor is cheap (through technology) then there is less reason not to do it. Happy people are people that don't have as much incentive to kill you to take your stuff.
In a world where we *can* all live in opulence, it just makes sense to ensure that we all do, so that we don't have as many disgruntled people trying to bring the whole system down out of spite. We don't currently have enough wealth for everyone in the world to live in opulence, but there is no reason we couldn't in the future with robot slaves.
Traditionally in this sort of example, the rock throwers and jar smashers represent the government. The people benefiting (those getting an otherwise unnecessary job) are the "special interests", and the ones who end up paying the cost are the taxpayers.
When the government decides it will pay people money to destroy their old cars (i.e. cash for clunkers), this creates jobs on the auto industry (the special interest), but it comes at the expense of the tax payer. It may seem like the beneficiary is the lowly autoworker with the new job, but this job is also profitable for the auto company (i.e. it's shareholders), that supplies it
Any economy with a lot of window smashing job creation is one that has a smaller wealth pool from which to distribute to the same number of people. All economies are exploitable by those who are good at exploiting. Having more total wealth puts less pressure on those that end up at the bottom. For example, look at the situation of poor people in the US compared with poor people in Africa.
Where horses really better off when they were more useful to man? They were essentially kept as slaves. They were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Maybe horses aren't smart enough to notice or care that they are slaves. Maybe some people aren't either.
Yes a difference between the common man and a horse is autonomy (one manifestation of which is the right to vote, along with other rights bestowed by various societies and constitutions and enforced by legal systems). When we say horses became useless, this is only in relation to people. What does it mean when people become useless? In relation to what? I'm sure some would argue that if the poor became useless to the rich, there would be a strong incentive to simply have the poor killed. This is probably true under some circumstances. But living in a society where the only thing keeping the poor alive is their usefulness (real or artificial through denial of technology) to the wealthy, seems to me to be barely an improvement. Maybe that was good enough for horses, but I wouldn't accept that for people.
I think people are intelligent and empathetic enough to come up with a system that respects human life while trying to maximize economic efficiency. I think sopping technology to keep the unskilled useful is one of the the dumbest things you can do if you care about overall human prosperity.
Even if you look at it from the point of view of the selfish uber-wealthy. If my options were to have 10% of my $billion income used to help poor people, or 90% of my $trillion income (facilitated by technology) used to sustain people who have no useful skills, it is simply irrational of me to choose the former. Obviously a selfish uber-wealthy person would rather just kill all the poor and keep 100%, but that's not one of the options allowed in this social contract. If people ever lose the right to vote or democracy fails, etc, all bets are off anyway.
What are humans good at? Doing the sorts of things that machines can't do well yet. If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort. It means that you no longer need to be rich (in terms of having money) in order to live a comfortable life. It means that the price of labor approaches zero, so even if you have almost zero dollars, you can have a lot of stuff.
Before we get to this (eu|dis)topian future, in the meantime, the price of goods and services will continue to get lower (but not to zero), and you need to have a job paying more than $0/hr to have things. The good news is that machines still suck at a lot of things compared to humans. Even "unskilled" people have skills merely by virtue of having a meat computer in their heads. They are usually capable of tasks like high accuracy image and facial recognition (which is why captchas work). We can pay people to transcribe old books and recognize and tag people in pictures for 2 cents a face/word and have the robots carry all the bricks up and down stairs for free.
Creating jobs is easy. Through a rock through a window. Job created. Smash a jar of food on the ground. Job created. There will be things that need to be done (i.e. jobs) for the forseeable future. We just need to allocate jobs to people/machines efficiently. This means *not* giving jobs to people that machines do better and vice versa. It also means *not* creating unnecessary jobs. If people are not up to the task of performing the jobs we need them to, then we train them, and training people is yet another job. Creating jobs is easy. Minimizing jobs is hard. Paying people for jobs that we don't need done is wasteful and unsustainable. We need to continually give people the skills necessary to do the jobs that machines can't do cheaply yet, and reap the free rewards from the jobs that machines can do cheaply. The more wealth we generate for the least effort, the more there is to go around.
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
Ultimately we don't really understand how anything works fundamentally. Why? Because the rules underpinning everything are the laws of nature. We know that quarks have "color charge", and we know that electrons have electric charge, etc, but we don't know why. We just take these to be fundamental laws until we discover something new. Even if we figure out "why" quarks have color charge, this will likely just lead to even more questions.
The real question isn't whether we understand something all the way down to the last turtle (there might not even be a last turtle). The real question is whether we are able to make accurate predictions or create a useful application using the limited knowledge we do have. Before we figured out why a proton is a proton (2 ups and a down quark), we were still able to do useful things with protons, and we can do useful things with quarks before we know why an up quark is an up quark.
If we make an AI before "understanding" how consciousness works, we at least understand it enough to make one, which is a big step. We also will have done a lot to prove that consciousness is just some kind of emergent property of having a bunch of neuron-like computers (biological, electrical, other, etc) in a network. While this is something that many people already think, this sort of experiment would be a big step in confirming it scientifically.
Ultimately we may never *fully* understand why consciousness leads to personal experience. What I am saying is that we may just come to a point where we understand it enough to predict which networks are conscious and which are not, and understand how to engineer a happy consciousness and a sad consciousness by fiddling with neurons, without knowing why fiddling it that way has that effect. In essence, what I am saying is, we may understand consciousness to the level that we understand how changing an up quark to a down quark will cause a proton to switch to a neutron without understanding why those are the rules. Isn't that good enough? If it's not, then we don't have any knowledge that's good enough.